Archive for the “cynical” Category

Dilbert and Garfield have a lot of things in common. They’re both massively successful comic strips. They’ve both been turned into animated series. They both have hugely profitable merchandising arms. They both found success through offering safe, relatively innocuous and uncontroversial humor keyed to appeal to as wide a demographic as possible.

So, really, there’s no need for newspapers to run both of them. There has to be a way to free up space in funny pages for something newer and more adventurous without alienating people who just want something to clip out and stick on their cubicle white-board. Which got me thinking…what if the cast of Dilbert were lazy, food-obsessed cats owned by a nerd?

Eh, that sort of works…but it still feels like there’s something missing from this equation…

I’m probably being unreasonably cranky this morning, but just as Marvel starts reaching a critical mass of putting out books I enjoy, I see their December solicitations…
Here’s the cover for the second issue of Black Widow: Deadly Origin:

Apparently one of Natasha’s lesser known powers is cold-resistant cleavage. And here I just thought she was a super-competent, near-immortal spy and assassin.
Oh well, there’s another Black Widow series coming out, and it’s written by Paul Tobin, and he does books with female characters that I’m not embarrassed to be seen reading.Black Widow and the Marvel Girls.
Marvel Girls? Not Marvel Women? Okay, post-feminist irony, I can live with that.